Squint and you could be in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the city’s business leaders dubbed Davis the bicycle capital of America.
Photograph: Carlton Reid

Sacramento in northern California is a typical American city, in thrall to the car. Twelve miles west is the university city of Davis. It’s not a typical American city; it’s in thrall to the bicycle.

Squint and you could be in the Netherlands: people dot around on bikes. Schoolchildren. Students. Professors. Bank managers. There are bike paths on the University of California Davis campus and in the city, the civic symbol of which is a penny-farthing. Cycling in Davis is not cultish: it’s ordinary, no special clothing required. In most American cities, the modal share for cycling struggles to reach 2%; in Davis it’s 20%. That’s well on the bike path to 25%, the average modal share for cycling in the Netherlands.

The campus, cheek-by-jowl with the city, is car-free. There are excellent rail connections to Sacramento, San Jose and San Francisco and, with a free bus service for students and university staff, it’s easy to live without a car in Davis. It’s even easier when your intra-urban travel can also be done swiftly and safely on a bicycle.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the rest of America was building only for cars, Davis built for bicycles. A heady mix of factors created a bike culture: a pancake-flat topography, dogged citizen activism, and a political buy-in.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the rest of America was building only for cars, Davis built for bicycles

Cycling in Davis is ordinary, no special clothing required. Photograph: Carlton Reid

Davis didn’t measure bicycle use in the 1960s or 1970s, but, with a share of 30% in 1980, it would be safe to assume the modal share was far higher in the preceding two decades. Legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams catalogued in a 1966 photo series how the Davis campus once hummed with cyclists. One of his black-and-white photographs shows a parking stand with hundreds of bicycles, students riding to and fro on either side. It’s one of the most unAmerican photographs imaginable.

The photo series and the cycling infrastructure were commissioned by Emil Mrak, who, in 1959, was made chancellor of the University of California’s Davis campus, which was to be expanded. The expansion involved increasing the student population from 2,000 to 10,000 (it’s now 30,000). The city could cope with an influx of 8,000 people but would have struggled to accommodate 8,000 cars. The bicycle-loving chancellor directed architects to “plan for a bicycle-riding, tree-lined campus”. Prospective students were told not to bring cars but to buy bicycles.

A married couple on the academic staff had spent time in the Netherlands, and they formed a small but persistent action group to press for Mrak’s vision to be implemented by the city, too. One letter to civic authorities chided, “Where the leaders have no vision, the people perish.”

Car-use was restricted on campus, with drop-down barriers and a ban on student car ownership (this is still in force). Bicycle routes were striped on the roads to the 37-block downtown core. Further chivvying from the action group led to the creation in 1967 of bicycle paths separated from cars by concrete curbing, normal for the Netherlands but a first for America. Use of bicycles boomed. On an early-1970s cycle map, a tagline was added by the city’s business leaders: “Davis: The Bicycle Capital of America.”

Bike riders on the campus of University of California, Davis circa 1960. Photograph: UC Davis Archive

Today, 98% of the main streets in Davis have some form of bicycle provision. Cycle use is highest on the campus, with 50% modal share (lecture rooms are distant, timings tight). When 7,000 or so new students arrive each October, many struggle to cope during their freshman induction days – upperclassmen students gather at campus intersections and cheer as newbies wobble into each other on the bicycle-specific traffic circles.

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But for all its spacious and separated bicycle paths, its bike parking corrals with free air and use of tools, and its continued self-proclamation as the bicycle capital of America, Davis is becoming less and less of a paradise for pedalling. Cycling’s modal share in the City of Davis dropped to as low as 14 percent in 2007, with the slack taken up by car and public bus use. When, in 2009, the US Bicycling Hall of Fame wanted to relocate from Somerville, New Jersey, it chose Davis but, if Davis thought securing this prestigious body would arrest cycling’s slide, it was mistaken.

In the Hall of Fame’s basement museum, I met with David Takemoto-Weerts, the bicycle coordinator at UC Davis since 1987. He’s a cycling enthusiast, attracted to the city because of its bike culture. It pains him to see cycling’s decline and he’s not entirely sure why a small, warm and flat city with such a well-connected and safe bicycle network should have halved its cycling modal share since the 1970s. By rights, cycling should be booming in Davis as it is elsewhere in the US; Boulder in Colorado is likely to soon overtake Davis as the bicycle capital of America. (Boulder has 160 miles of bike paths, and – to rub salt in Davis’s wound – it recently hired Dave “DK” Kemp, the former bicycle coordinator of the City of Davis, an expert at raising state funds for cycling projects.)

Takemoto-Weerts said the city of Davis is too “timid” when planning for cycling, guilty of resting on its laurels, while Boulder has created ambitious bicycle programmes and marketed its bike path network.

Plans for a new Dutch-style junction in Davis. Photograph: City of Davis

Like other Davis cycling experts I talked to, Takemoto-Weerts credits the “golden age” of cycling in Davis to Dave Pelz, who became the public works director for the city in 1968. It was Pelz, with a remit from pro-cycling politicians, who built the bike paths and created educational programmes such as “Mr Smartspokes”, a talking bicycle that toured the city’s elementary schools. When Pelz (and Mr Smartspokes) retired in 1999, a great deal of fizz went out of the city’s provision for cycling.

“The city backed away from its commitment to cycling that it had exhibited under Pelz,” agreed Takemoto-Weerts. “It may never return to the golden age we enjoyed under Dave and his crew.”

Cycling is so ingrained in Davis that the city symbol is a penny farthing

This is an opinion shared by Ted Buehler, author of the only rigorous study into Davis’ cycling history. Via Skype, he told me that cycling had been the norm for almost every student and university staffer in the 1970s, but that since the 1980s the city’s lacklustre promotion of the bicycle had dented cycling’s popularity.

“A lot of students stopped riding bikes, and now ride the bus or drive a car,” complained Buehler, who moved to become a bicycle advocate in Portland, Oregon. Pulling on his beard, he added: “Even though Davis appears to be a magical place, it doesn’t create a strong culture of people who are excited about riding their bikes.”

But this could be about to change. A reinvigorated campaign group – Davis Bicycles! – has been working hard to elevate the profile of cycling in the city and on the campus.

“Davis Bicycles! has done an enormous amount of research to push for better bicycle infrastructure,” argued Buehler.

“When there were plans for yet another car-parking garage, members of Davis Bicycles went out at all times of the day and night to measure the use of the existing parking garages. They demonstrated that there were always parking spaces available for motorists – the City of Davis eventually scrapped its plans, saving taxpayers $30m.”

“Davis has too little ambition,” worries Glaser. “It has not built any ‘thank-you’ bridges – which say: ‘Thank you for cycling, thank you for your efficiency.’”

That’s no longer true, says Earl Bossard, an urban-planning professor at San Jose State University, California, and a Davis resident since 1986. Davis is starting to think big, he claims. It is building a “Dutch-style” traffic intersection, one of North America’s first (an intersection in Vancouver, Canada, offering separation for cyclists from motor traffic, is usually incorrectly credited as the first such intersection in North America). The Covell intersection in Davis is opening later in the summer – it was designed by the Dutch Cycling Embassy, a commercial agency of the Dutch government, and Mobycon, a Dutch “place-making” consultancy.

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I met with Bossard at the University of Amsterdam on the Planning the Cycling City summer school, billed as the world’s first university course on cycling. Bossard, who sits on the Davis transportation commission, said his adopted city is waking up to the fact it will have to up the ante if it truly wants to increase cycling’s modal share. In the last 20 years, city engineers have devoted too much time, energy and money to the needs of motorists, he says. (After a cycling activist measured the one-lane road in front of City Hall and argued that a bike lane could be accommodated, City of Davis engineers instead carved out two lanes for motorists.) But the focus on motorists could change soon: the next mayor is a bicycle activist, and he even campaigned for votes from a cargo bicycle. Robb Davis – no relation to the city – takes office in 2016 and he may strengthen cycling provision in Davis. Bossard said voters knew the mayor-to-be was a cycling advocate.

“Davis’s original cycling culture in the 1960s was the result of citizen campaigning that led to political leadership,” said Bossard. “Robb Davis is a mix of both. With a cycling enthusiast in charge of Davis, we could move beyond the glory days.”